I think if anything, you guys are making the case that you shouldn't need to spend more than a few million on a goalie. After all, they clearly need some insulation from the defense to be successful. We've seen so many random goalies make runs. Just get a competent pro goalie back there and focus on playing good defense.

How come that dude is calm and so damn steady and our guy freaks out and lets things get to him so easily? Even in his interviews, I can tell Holtby has this serious tone about him like Brodeur. And how come the Caps can draft 3 good goalies and we can't? First thing I look at a goalie during draft is the personality, then skill.

How come that dude is calm and so damn steady and our guy freaks out and lets things get to him so easily? Even in his interviews, I can tell Holtby has this serious tone about him like Brodeur. And how come the Caps can draft 3 good goalies and we can't? First thing I look at a goalie during draft is the personality, then skill.

Look at the numbers I have posted. Holtby is only dealing with 40% of the shots against being dangerous shots. A number that low is nearly 10% lower than the league average. Flower, unfortunately, I do not have numbers for.

Pens15 wrote:I think if anything, you guys are making the case that you shouldn't need to spend more than a few million on a goalie. After all, they clearly need some insulation from the defense to be successful. We've seen so many random goalies make runs. Just get a competent pro goalie back there and focus on playing good defense.

Exactly. There is no need for an overpaid supposed "star" goalie when the money is better spent on an average goalie with an excellent defense.

How come that dude is calm and so damn steady and our guy freaks out and lets things get to him so easily? Even in his interviews, I can tell Holtby has this serious tone about him like Brodeur. And how come the Caps can draft 3 good goalies and we can't? First thing I look at a goalie during draft is the personality, then skill.

Look at the numbers I have posted. Holtby is only dealing with 40% of the shots against being dangerous shots. A number that low is nearly 10% lower than the league average. Flower, unfortunately, I do not have numbers for.

Oh, I agree with that. What happened is a combination of crappy defense AND poor goaltending. I think that Fleury's 'yoyo' play - awesome to ridiculous - is a good indication of his psyche, however. When he's sure of the D, he plays better, and becomes shaky when he can't trust them.

How come that dude is calm and so damn steady and our guy freaks out and lets things get to him so easily? Even in his interviews, I can tell Holtby has this serious tone about him like Brodeur. And how come the Caps can draft 3 good goalies and we can't? First thing I look at a goalie during draft is the personality, then skill.

Look at the numbers I have posted. Holtby is only dealing with 40% of the shots against being dangerous shots. A number that low is nearly 10% lower than the league average. Flower, unfortunately, I do not have numbers for.

Oh, I agree with that. What happened is a combination of crappy defense AND poor goaltending. I think that Fleury's 'yoyo' play - awesome to ridiculous - is a good indication of his psyche, however. When he's sure of the D, he plays better, and becomes shaky when he can't trust them.

Which means he is over thinking. He is trying to be one step ahead to try and bail everyone out. Instead of focusing on himself, he loses focus of everything and tries to overcompensate. It makes everything harder. The game becomes much harder when you don't have complete focus of your own job.

How come that dude is calm and so damn steady and our guy freaks out and lets things get to him so easily? Even in his interviews, I can tell Holtby has this serious tone about him like Brodeur. And how come the Caps can draft 3 good goalies and we can't? First thing I look at a goalie during draft is the personality, then skill.

Look at the numbers I have posted. Holtby is only dealing with 40% of the shots against being dangerous shots. A number that low is nearly 10% lower than the league average. Flower, unfortunately, I do not have numbers for.

So according to that article, the league avg sv% for 'dangerous shots' was .854. Fleury's sv% for the series was .834. Even if 100% of the shots were considered 'dangerous', he still finished 20 points lower than the league avg. Does that give you a better idea of how bad he played?

A couple of things. I'm not going to try to evaluate Fleury's performance because he is my favorite player on the planet and I'd have trouble viewing him objectively.

-Fleury is not overpaid. He is somewhere right in the middle of salary for starting goalies.

-Fleury led the league in wins this year. And I know that the wins are a team effort, but I'm hearing too much blame for the losses, and not enough credit for what he has done for the last 2 years.

It was really nice seeing most of the board either come around to support Fleury last year, or at least lessen the "hate". And its frustrating seeing how quickly the same people abandon hope when things don't go perfectly.

Fleury isn't perfect, and even an unapologetic apologist like me has to admit that his play towards the end of the season and in the playoffs left a lot to be desired. But I think a lot of this criticism is reactionary and short sighted. Seeing posts in this thread saying that Fleury has been terrible for the last two years just leave me scratching my head.

But again,I admittedly can never be a glass half empty guy in regards to Fleury.

for better or worse, he's our goalie for the foreseeable future. it's important not to ride him into the ground next season. if he gets a more reasonable workload and still craps himself in the playoffs, then you do something drastic. but first, you need to try it this way and see if it works.

Rylan wrote:Look at the numbers I have posted. Holtby is only dealing with 40% of the shots against being dangerous shots. A number that low is nearly 10% lower than the league average. Flower, unfortunately, I do not have numbers for.

Oh, I agree with that. What happened is a combination of crappy defense AND poor goaltending. I think that Fleury's 'yoyo' play - awesome to ridiculous - is a good indication of his psyche, however. When he's sure of the D, he plays better, and becomes shaky when he can't trust them.

Which means he is over thinking. He is trying to be one step ahead to try and bail everyone out. Instead of focusing on himself, he loses focus of everything and tries to overcompensate. It makes everything harder. The game becomes much harder when you don't have complete focus of your own job.

The statement you made here goes for how a poorly performing goalie impacts the defense as well. As I have probably said too many times already, if Fleury had made the right 5 additional saves the Pens would have won in 5 games. He was that bad.

The two biggest turning points in the series were in games 1 and 2. Briere's first goal in Game 1, where he was a mile offside, was a terrible play as analzyed by every goalie I have heard weigh in. He clearly committed to the poke check while Briere had his head up. That was too easy of a forehand finish when even peewee goalies know you can't go for the poke when a good scorer has his head up.

Turning point # 2 was the Lovejoy giveaway. That was not even a move by Couturie, it was a simple forehand finish because Fleury overcommitted to the backhand pull which never had to come.

I know that BOTH plays started with defensive mistakes. I get that. Fleury makes either of those saves and we still may be playing. There are at least 15 goals in that series that were stoppable, and to varying degrees most had serious implications because of timing.

I have gone over and over as well the fact that many Cup champions were pushed in their opening rounds by inferior teams. They survive for the most part on heroics by their goalie when it matters most. The Rangers, Caps and Devils all got past opponents in round 1 based on their goaltending. The Pens played horribly and without discipline. They were terrible on the PK, but doesn't the saying go that your best Penalty Killer is your goalie? The goalie chose the position where the credit and blame land. Fleury was indefensible in that series. He lost to the worst Playoff goalie going in. His opponent lived up to his rep, and unfortunately so did Fleury.

How come that dude is calm and so damn steady and our guy freaks out and lets things get to him so easily? Even in his interviews, I can tell Holtby has this serious tone about him like Brodeur. And how come the Caps can draft 3 good goalies and we can't? First thing I look at a goalie during draft is the personality, then skill.

Look at the numbers I have posted. Holtby is only dealing with 40% of the shots against being dangerous shots. A number that low is nearly 10% lower than the league average. Flower, unfortunately, I do not have numbers for.

So according to that article, the league avg sv% for 'dangerous shots' was .854. Fleury's sv% for the series was .834. Even if 100% of the shots were considered 'dangerous', he still finished 20 points lower than the league avg. Does that give you a better idea of how bad he played?

The point was about the defense failing as well. Good defense can and will make the goalie better. It had nothing to do about Fleury.

How come that dude is calm and so damn steady and our guy freaks out and lets things get to him so easily? Even in his interviews, I can tell Holtby has this serious tone about him like Brodeur. And how come the Caps can draft 3 good goalies and we can't? First thing I look at a goalie during draft is the personality, then skill.

Look at the numbers I have posted. Holtby is only dealing with 40% of the shots against being dangerous shots. A number that low is nearly 10% lower than the league average. Flower, unfortunately, I do not have numbers for.

So according to that article, the league avg sv% for 'dangerous shots' was .854. Fleury's sv% for the series was .834. Even if 100% of the shots were considered 'dangerous', he still finished 20 points lower than the league avg. Does that give you a better idea of how bad he played?

The point was about the defense failing as well. Good defense can and will make the goalie better. It had nothing to do about Fleury.

Conversely, a good goalie can paper over defensive problems. When the defense is leaky and the goalie off his game, it leads to a horror show.

How come that dude is calm and so damn steady and our guy freaks out and lets things get to him so easily? Even in his interviews, I can tell Holtby has this serious tone about him like Brodeur. And how come the Caps can draft 3 good goalies and we can't? First thing I look at a goalie during draft is the personality, then skill.

Look at the numbers I have posted. Holtby is only dealing with 40% of the shots against being dangerous shots. A number that low is nearly 10% lower than the league average. Flower, unfortunately, I do not have numbers for.

This. The Rangers aren't exactly an offensive juggernaut. Fleury looked good against them all year long.

How come that dude is calm and so damn steady and our guy freaks out and lets things get to him so easily? Even in his interviews, I can tell Holtby has this serious tone about him like Brodeur. And how come the Caps can draft 3 good goalies and we can't? First thing I look at a goalie during draft is the personality, then skill.

Look at the numbers I have posted. Holtby is only dealing with 40% of the shots against being dangerous shots. A number that low is nearly 10% lower than the league average. Flower, unfortunately, I do not have numbers for.

This. The Rangers aren't exactly an offensive juggernaut. Fleury looked good against them all year long.

Fleury looked good/great against a lot of teams all year long. The Flyers, however, consistently beat up on him and the Pens.

How come that dude is calm and so damn steady and our guy freaks out and lets things get to him so easily? Even in his interviews, I can tell Holtby has this serious tone about him like Brodeur. And how come the Caps can draft 3 good goalies and we can't? First thing I look at a goalie during draft is the personality, then skill.

Look at the numbers I have posted. Holtby is only dealing with 40% of the shots against being dangerous shots. A number that low is nearly 10% lower than the league average. Flower, unfortunately, I do not have numbers for.

So according to that article, the league avg sv% for 'dangerous shots' was .854. Fleury's sv% for the series was .834. Even if 100% of the shots were considered 'dangerous', he still finished 20 points lower than the league avg. Does that give you a better idea of how bad he played?

The point was about the defense failing as well. Good defense can and will make the goalie better. It had nothing to do about Fleury.

Conversely, a good goalie can paper over defensive problems. When the defense is leaky and the goalie off his game, it leads to a horror show.

No amount of paper was going to fix what happened to the Pens this past postseason. The defense was beyond leaky, as was Fleury. The ending results are what we saw. Flower has shown this past season he can cover for a poor defense and he did it for about 3-4 months before he himself started to crack. Its a team game and there is a team on the pond, not just Fleury standing alone.

Froggy wrote:A couple of things. I'm not going to try to evaluate Fleury's performance because he is my favorite player on the planet and I'd have trouble viewing him objectively.

-Fleury is not overpaid. He is somewhere right in the middle of salary for starting goalies.

-Fleury led the league in wins this year. And I know that the wins are a team effort, but I'm hearing too much blame for the losses, and not enough credit for what he has done for the last 2 years.

It was really nice seeing most of the board either come around to support Fleury last year, or at least lessen the "hate". And its frustrating seeing how quickly the same people abandon hope when things don't go perfectly.

Fleury isn't perfect, and even an unapologetic apologist like me has to admit that his play towards the end of the season and in the playoffs left a lot to be desired. But I think a lot of this criticism is reactionary and short sighted. Seeing posts in this thread saying that Fleury has been terrible for the last two years just leave me scratching my head.

But again,I admittedly can never be a glass half empty guy in regards to Fleury.

Quoted for great perspective

Before Sid's 2nd comeback, there wasn't a GT in the league that we would've rather seen in our net than MAF. He was as solid as solid can be. Sid coming back changed the philosophy of what this team hoped to accomplish on any given night. Our offense exploded, and our defense suffered. It wasn't an instant change, but the team's mindset deteriorated into pond hockey...which, IMO, wouldn't been fine against any of the other 6 teams in the SCP. Philly came in confident in the knowledge that they knew how to beat us, and we didn't adjust to dent that confidence.

People spouting the 'if he would've just had like 5 more saves' crap are being so myopic. If the team would've taken 5 less penalties, the D blocked 5 more shots, Sid and Geno would've scored 5 more goals, we would've walk away from 5 more scrums, our PP would've scored 5 more goals, our PK would've stopped 5 more cross-crease passes, the team would've made 5 less attempts to go up the side boards when the Flyers D was pinching below our wings, our coaching staff would've made 5 meaningful adjustments, or we would've gotten 5 more lucky bounces, well...you get the point.

Fleury was the team's MVP for this year, IMO. He was a top 3 GT all year...but his wheels came off when the teams' wheels came off.

Did you guys read this article on Burke/Smith? I think this is exactly what Fleury needs. A coach with a new apprach that will add fundamentals and focus on minimal movement to Fleury's natural atheticism.

People spouting the 'if he would've just had like 5 more saves' crap are being so myopic. If the team would've taken 5 less penalties, the D blocked 5 more shots, Sid and Geno would've scored 5 more goals, we would've walk away from 5 more scrums, our PP would've scored 5 more goals, our PK would've stopped 5 more cross-crease passes, the team would've made 5 less attempts to go up the side boards when the Flyers D was pinching below our wings, our coaching staff would've made 5 meaningful adjustments, or we would've gotten 5 more lucky bounces, well...you get the point.

This guy gets it.

Throwing Fleury under the bus for a team's failure is nonsense. Fleury is part of that team and contributed but what happened in the first round was a complete organizational failure, from Shero to Bylsma down to essentially every single player. Asking Fleury to clean up the mess of his team that wouldn't play D in front of him, couldn't keep its composure, couldn't kill a penalty to save their lives and to clean up the mess of a coaching staff that got completely out coached and had no answer for problems that haunted them against Philly all season, completely unfair. He shouldn't be scapegoated. No single player should be, not even Paul Martin.

Henry Hank wrote:Asking Fleury to clean up the mess of his team that wouldn't play D in front of him, couldn't keep its composure, couldn't kill a penalty to save their lives and to clean up the mess of a coaching staff that got completely out coached and had no answer for problems that haunted them against Philly all season, completely unfair. He shouldn't be scapegoated. No single player should be, not even Paul Martin.

The goalie is the most important position, which is why the winning goalie is usually named one of the game's three stars. The losing goalie is often the scapegoat for good reason.

Fleury is paid to and expected to make up for many of his teams mistakes on an offensively-minded team. He failed miserably at that in the Flyer series and for the first time ever, most of the local and national hockey media were very critical of him. That is very telling.

If the team lost its composure, maybe it's because Fleury lost HIS composure, giving up ridiculously soft goals and not stopping nearly enough of the good chances against. As Crosby said in an interview during the Flyer series: "Everytime we make a mistake, it ends up in the back of our net." He must have been tremendously frustrated to backhandedly criticize a teammate like that. It's out of character.

Bad goaltending demoralizes the skaters and causes systems to breakdown as each player, especially the offensive stars, tries to "outscore" the opposition himself, out of frustration. That leads to even more good chances against.

Finally, it has always been said that your goalie is supposed to be your best penalty killer.

Just read through this. They do some statistical/simulative comparisons of several goalies, including MAF. Here's what they found from their analysis:

It could be argued that Fleury’s distribution over 5-game stretches is just the slightest bit broader than the simulated Fleury, but the difference is not large. The standard deviation – a measure of the spread of the results – is 0.026 for Fleury’s actual results and 0.025 for simulated Fleury, a difference that is virtually imperceptible in reality and as likely as not due to imperfections in the model (see appendix).

To a first approximation, it’s fair to say that Fleury’s consistency is what you’d see from a robot goalie that had no effects of injury, confidence, focus, or whatever else might cause a goaltender to appear more dialed in at some times than at others.

Of the six goalies they compare - Fleury, Bryzgalov, Lundqvist, Rinne, Halak, and Price - the variance numbers were almost identical.

The results of the study found the following variances from the goalies' average save percentages:

Just read through this. They do some statistical/simulative comparisons of several goalies, including MAF. Here's what they found from their analysis:

It could be argued that Fleury’s distribution over 5-game stretches is just the slightest bit broader than the simulated Fleury, but the difference is not large. The standard deviation – a measure of the spread of the results – is 0.026 for Fleury’s actual results and 0.025 for simulated Fleury, a difference that is virtually imperceptible in reality and as likely as not due to imperfections in the model (see appendix).

To a first approximation, it’s fair to say that Fleury’s consistency is what you’d see from a robot goalie that had no effects of injury, confidence, focus, or whatever else might cause a goaltender to appear more dialed in at some times than at others.

Of the six goalies they compare - Fleury, Bryzgalov, Lundqvist, Rinne, Halak, and Price - the variance numbers were almost identical.

The results of the study found the following variances from the goalies' average save percentages: